Melike Vivastine Konur (b. Fairfax, Virginia; works between Pittsburgh, USA and Istanbul, Türkiye) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and culture bearer whose practice investigates how shared stories bridge temporal gaps in cultural memory. Working across performance, installation, moving image, public scholarship, and social practice, she examines how artistic practice can reshape the ways people understand themselves.

Grounded in the belief that care is infrastructure and mothering is a form of intelligence, Konur approaches artistic practice as a relational methodology.

Drawing from Afro-Turkish history, Black diasporic memory, and the often-overlooked histories of the trans-Mediterranean diaspora, Konur investigates the intersections of migration, authorship, and cultural inheritance. Her ongoing research into the Afro-Turkish singer Esmeray examines cultural banditry—the extraction, erasure, or reassignment of cultural authorship and memory.

Across artworks, institutional collaborations, and public engagement, Konur positions storytelling as a method of cultural care. By bringing together embodied knowledge, artistic research, and systems thinking, her practice contributes to an emerging discourse that understands care, mothering, and relational knowledge not as private virtues, but as rigorous cultural intelligences capable of reconnecting fractured lineages, restoring authorship, and expanding collective imagination.